| "Some of you may think such a test is a waste of time but I assure you it is not. It's astonishing how many people can't do this." Well, I can assure you that as a kernel programmer, I think it IS indeed a waste of time. It's also astonishing that the moment the interviewer asks me something like this, my enthusiasm and interest in the interview drops by more than 50%. When I apply for a kernel programming a job at Google, I am dying to talk about my system internals knowledge, device driver programming experience, subtle differences between the AMD/Intel arch and what not. Instead, what do I get ? The recruiter asks me to recite by heart problems from a popular algorithms book for the pre-screening. It's like the prospective employer is telling me : I don't care what you did in the last three years. Let's start from scratch! What also bothers me is the the test for coding skills. When a company hires a Linux kernel developer, the best possible way to test for coding skills is to look at my contributions. Instead, I am asked to write code and implement malloc so that the interviewer gets a taste of my coding knowledge. I think this is a huge waste of time. My point being that the job interview at Google is incredibly generic. I believe that just like you should have a different resume for each job you apply to, the same applies to the interview process too. More Info: This is very specific to my interview experience at Google. The two times that I applied at Google for Linux kernel development positions, overall I had the same experience as described above. Some more Info : I also don't understand the idea of the algorithms test during the prescreen. If you go through the algorithms book the recruiter suggests and look up on glassdoor for interview questions, there's a very fair chance that you already know the answer to the question that's being asked! |
Most of the supposed brilliant Algorithm and Math brains are basically people who crawl internet forums for puzzle questions by spending around 30 minutes everyday.
They don't know a jack about algorithms or math. Its just they know enough to game the interview.